The GOP, your local Anti-American insurgency

From the people who a decade ago brought us improvised sexual commerce as a Constitutional crisis, we are now treated to presidential prudence as a sinister collapse of national security.

Who, I ask, can rid us of these insufferable boors?

I ask "can" rather than "will," since ability is easier to identify than intent, although from the White House we are already seeing both.

In response, for example, to Dick Cheney's most recent fraudulent malevolence -- "Why doesn’t [Obama] want to admit we’re at war? [Because] it doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office" -- Dan Pfeiffer, the White House Communications Director, blasted back that the former vice president is but symptomatic of the diseased and impoverished minds on the lockstep right "who have been coming out of the woodwork since the incident on Christmas Day."

This president, concluded, Pfeiffer, "doesn’t need to beat his chest" like the last president, either "to prove" we're at war or that he understands the stakes.

Pfeiffer's answer to Cheney was a powerful statement, with which I had only one reservation: He answered Cheney.

Of the 604 words in the communication director's post -- "The Same Old Washington Blame Game" -- on the White House Blog, more than 200 were devoted to a meticulous refutation of Cheney's vividly duplicitous accusations.

And nothing could make the former vice president happier: He can now counter-counterattack through the release of selective, acontextual quotes, and off, again, to the media-circus races we'll go.

Furthermore, in this instance the White House was fighting down. Who or what is Dick Cheney, other than an astounding failure and antiAmerican impulse personified? Do these qualities merit -- by name -- the critical attention of the White House?

Instead, the Obama administration should anonymously subsume Cheney unto the murky collectivity of modern Republicanism, which itself more grandly, notionally and accurately represents the Platonic Ideals of absolute failure, political pettiness, and the utter lack of any credibility on any issue.

The GOP is no loyal opposition party, philosophically dedicated to a better way and yearning to spread the Good Conservative Word. It is, rather, a vile insurgency; its lifeblood is the Big Lie, class warfare, racial tension, economic precariousness and perpetual global warring. It is the dark, malicious underside of political opportunism at any cost to the American people's welfare.

As such, in 2010 the White House must retreat from its delicate overtures of what still is astonishingly called bipartisanship -- there is no longer any reasonable hope of a "bi"; there is the ruling party, and then there's that largely cornered geographical cesspool in enthusiastic support of whatever weakens America, so that its occupant of a vicious political octopus may opportunistically spread, again, its cancerous tentacles.

Forgive my stridency. But the GOP has declared the equivalent of a civil war. Republicans will, it is clear, stop at nothing to regain power. And it is incumbent upon the White House to make that clear while simultaneously withholding the temptation to name names, since, with very few exceptions, they are interchangeable.

And here I return to my original question: Who can rid us of these insufferable boors? -- who "can" rather than "will"?

For the White House, it seems, is both able and willing enough; Obama's patience with these corrosive fools is wearing gossamer thin. Yet from his party we hear in a big way shockingly little.

There are a few voices among Congressional Democrats that are aggressively bemoaning the GOP's hypocrisy and the unfairness of suffering withering attacks from what have become, in effect, organized political criminals. But by and large the majority party is behaving according to Democratic s.o.p.: squirm a bit, indignantly grin, whine a little, and caress the high notion of dismissing the lowest of motivations.

They've got to get mad -- not shrill, as I have been here, for strategic purposes, but tutorially angry.

In early 2010 they must and they can come out swinging, en masse, and shut down the GOP's long-term agenda-setting venom; not by addressing it point by point, which only honors dishonesty, but by painting with the broadest of counteroffensive strokes: Those other angry voices you hear, folks, aren't those of a loyal opposition -- they're determined insurgents who will plunge to any dishonorable depth to undermine and delegitimize America's government, your government.

Get mad, dear Democrats, and for once, do it right and do it incisively. There's much more at stake here than midterm elections.